The continued mis-reporting of family cases by Christopher Booker.
#familylaw statutory charge misunderstood https://t.co/EKwx57POfA
— Louise McCallum (@LMcCallumZenith) March 12, 2017
The klaxon rang in the Transparency Project bat cave with a direct plea from Louise for assistance.
I was pleased to offer my help, particularly as it seemed as if the Telegraph had engaged some fresh new journalistic talent:
"In Britain's secretive family courts, the lawyers always win," writes Christopher Booth #premium https://t.co/MIfiYxqsi0
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) March 11, 2017
Hurrah! I thought. This will make a nice change from that Christopher Booker character who doesn’t seem to ever bother to read the judgments in the cases he makes partial and inaccurate comment about.
Sadly, the Telegraph’s commitment to inaccurate reporting, extends even to their own journalists’ names. Christopher Booth is of course Christopher Booker who needs no introduction to anyone who keeps even half a lazy eye on reporting about the family courts.
As I haven’t yet been able to persuade anyone to invest in my brilliant new app ‘Booker Bablefish’ which would magically transform what Booker writes into accurate and truthful reporting, I will have to go old school and present you with the following table. On my rough calculations Mr Booker is about 20% accurate in his reporting of this case.
| Booker version | Accurate version |
| One reason why cases can drag on so long and involve so many “bundles” of documents is that parents fighting not to lose their children can have four or more teams of lawyers ranged against them, | A typical set of care proceedings will involve the local authority, the parents and the guardian. If the parents are agreeing with each other then they will face one ‘team of lawyers’ from the LA. If the Guardian supports the LA his/her team will be ‘ranged against’ the parents. So that’s two. If the parents aren’t supporting each other then each parent may face three adversaries, but I have no idea how Mr Booker gets to ‘four or more’.
Possibly if someone else is joined as a party because allegations are made against them? If the siblings have different fathers who participate in the proceedings? If Grandparents come on board? But these people could be supporting the parents! Whatever the scenario, parents facing ‘four or more teams’ against them is not commonplace and Mr Booker needs to explain what on earth he is talking about. He is not accurate. |
| who can also claim extra payments for the number of documents they bring into court. | Not at all sure what he is getting at here. I can only speak for barristers. I get to tick a box to show if papers in a case are more than 350, more than 700 or more than 1,400. I will get paid slightly more if there are more papers because,er, it takes longer to read them all.
However, The President is very clear that cases should be dealt with by 350 pages or less. See the relevant practice direction. The court controls what evidence is admitted. We can’t just ‘turn up’ to court with it and claim extra cash. He is not accurate. |
| [the baby was removed] following the father’s complaint in hospital that the child was being given “formula” milk in bottles not properly sterilised. | There is a lot more going on in this case, as anyone would know f they read the judgment. It seems that Mr Booker doesn’t like to fetter his expression by referring to the actual facts of any case. If you would like to see the judgment and make up your own mind, it is here.
He is not accurate |
| Social workers then sought an emergency hearing to place the child under the care of its paternal grandmother, however they did not tell the parents that the hearing was taking place, wrongly told the judge that they had been informed, and also “forgot to notify” Cafcass, the agency that represents children’s interests in court. | This was wrong, unacceptable behavior, recognised by the Judge and rightly criticized as a breach of the family’s human rights.
Mr Booker is accurate here. |
| The judge criticised “unwarranted expenditure” of the law firms involved in the case, after cost schedules supplied to the court showed that the family had racked up legal aid bills of nearly £80,000, while Kirklees Council had costs of around £40,000. | This is a very partial and misleading summary of what the Judge actually said about costs. You can read what he said in the judgment. At paragraph 66 he made it very clear that the parents could not claim their costs back from the local authority because of the parents own litigation misconduct – “They failed to respond constructively to the Local Authority’s efforts to achieve a negotiated settlement; from an early stage”
Mr Booker is not accurate here
|
There was something else going on about the statutory charge but frankly I’d lost the will to care by now.
You can read a more detailed and accurate consideration of the Kirklees case and the impact of the statutory charge here http://www.transparencyproject.org.uk/the-kirklees-case-whats-going-on-with-the-human-rights-act/
This kind of reporting is entirely typical from Mr Booker. But it has a new aura of sadness and bleakness around it now, in the light of the recent comments of McFarlane LJ who pointed out just how much damage is done by feeding parents inaccurate and harmful misinformation about the chid protection system.
I guess I have to accept, as Adam Wagner recently pointed out, that it isn’t enough just to keep on ‘myth busting’. We have to appeal to people’s emotions. But can the boring, bland truth ever be good enough to counter the lazy, emotive untruth?
Probably worth saying for those who don’t know what the statutory charge is or why it matters : the statutory charge is a legal aid rule which says that where lawyers work under legal aid in certain types of cases the costs of that work must come out of any damages they recover. That makes sense in cases where people recover chunkier sums of money that are larger than the costs spent, and in family cases this mostly happens where someone recovers a sum of money or an asset after divorce. Typically, this will be a house, a part of a house or money to invest in a purchase, and in these cases the statutory charge is deferred (a bit like a second mortgage) so the person does actually get to use the award for its intended purpose (to provide a home for themselves and their children). In Human Rights cases this doesn’t work so well because awards are smaller and there is no way to defer the charge, so the damages are just eaten up, which makes the whole thing a bit pointless.
The important thing to understand is that the lawyers have no say about this, only Parliament can change it. The lawyers get paid the same amount either way, whether or not the statutory charge applies and many of the recent cases have been about lawyers trying to find a way for their clients to receive the award that they have theoretically achieved for them but which in practice will be swallowed up. So far that hasn’t been very successful, and most lawyers agree the law needs to be changed by ministers / Parliament to allow them to actually get proper redress for their clients.
It’s also worth saying that in most family cases with a human rights element the lawyer at court often doesn’t receive any more income for running a case of this sort, because they’d be at court being paid under legal aid anyway as the cases are run mainly within care proceedings, and unless the HRA claim lengthens the hearing they usually won’t get paid more (and will often have to do a lot more unpaid preparation because of the HRA aspect). And many lawyers are running these claims for free because its the only way that their clients can get redress.
What would have been a good story is the fact that the legal aid statutory charge is making these claims completely unworkable, and seems to be contributing to a view on the part of some judges that they are an expensive waste of time / distraction – in fact they are really important and the government is obliged to ensure that there is meaningful access to justice and an effective remedy for the unlawful actions of the state. Sometimes a declaration of wrongdoing is an effective remedy, but in other cases it is not sufficient. At present the legal aid system is a barrier to an effective remedy not a facilitator of it. This is all the more concerning when one remembers that many of the claimants in this sort of case are children whose right to family life has been breached.
In short, what is most grating about Christopher Booker’s story is that he misses the real story of injustice because he is so busy seizing the delectable opportunity to stick it to the evil lawyers.
i will always find it hard to criticize Mr Booker for one simple reason.
all he wants is justice in the family courts and parents to be treated like human beings instead of Farm animals but its quite clear that is not happening.
my partner and i have first hand experience of the Newcastle Family courts
which lasted 15 months.
we know without a shadow of doubt that there is no real justice in these courts and the whole system is cleverly structured by the Local authorities and the judges. theres strong evidence that secret clandestine meetings are taking place which the parents are not told about. im so glad Justice Pauffley exposed this fact in 2014 otherwise nobody would have believed it. Booker is right, Hemming is right, Josephs is right. the family courts are rigged against parents. especially when the SS are aggressively in pursuit of Adoption orders.
The Pauffley judgment you refer to outlawed a practice which was previously prevalent, namely the drafting of facts and reasons by lawyers. I have not seen evidence that it remains prevalent. In fact in my experience I have seen lawyers refuse to do it, and they are no longer asked.
Mr Booker is accurate in reporting this story.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11877397/Christopher-Booker-Childs-health-in-care-gets-even-worse.html